“This kind of ‘reading’, however, no longer produces interpretations but merely _tests_ them: it’s not the beginning of the critical enterprise, but its appendix. And then, here you don’t really read the _text_ anymore, but rather through the text, looking for your unit of analysis. The task is constrained from the start; it’s a reading without freedom.”
– Franco Moretti talks about returning to the source novels after engaging in some distant reading. From his 2000 article “Conjectures on World Literature.”
“[A]mazingly, remarkably, counterintuitively and bizarrely, humanities majors in the United States, as a percentage of all bachelor’s degrees, have held steady since about 1990—since the onset of the culture wars, in fact. Despite all the attacks on our Piss Christ this and our queerying that and our deconstructing the Other; despite all the parents and friends and journalists and random passersby telling students they’ll be consigned to a life of selling apples and flipping burgers if they major in English; despite the skyrocketing of tuition and the rise of the predatory private-student-loan industry; despite all this, humanities enrollments have been at or about the 8 percent mark for about twenty years.”
– Michael Bérubé brings it. He’s right; it’s pretty much entirely unlikely that any “o noez hoomanicheez” article will have begun with a legit premise.
During coursework, I took a class co-offered both at my uni and at UIC. As a co-offered course, it was also co-taught, and one of the profs, Walter Benn Michaels, at one point, as is his wont, issued a seeming non sequitur of a command: “raise your hands if either of your parents is a [...]
Even though in my last post I tried to describe the movement towards “doing scholarship in public” that forms a background for three different levels of academic fights these days, it still seems sometimes like the “humanities is a waste of time” fight remains the most salient. After all, if one takes that waste of [...]
Continue reading about Cultural neuroscience to the rescue of us lost humanists?
This is, I imagine, the much shorter version of a post I have had simmering in my head for a few weeks now–or, well, actually, many of the issues dovetail with another post that’s been around since new years. But somehow I haven’t sat down to figure out my point rigorously yet, and so I [...]
Continue reading about Making this worth it by going to the streets
In the first part of this post, I described how a lot of ways in which work in the humanities is interacting with the spatial is in the process of generating “flat maps.” That is, they reproduce what is already in the texts themselves, without pushing any analytical balls forward. These sorts of projects engage [...]
(although, actually, all the talk about using a GIS is in the second part!) I often feel like I’m a few drinks behind the rest of the crowd when it comes to drinking the digital humanities Kool-Aid. This is kind of a problem, because a chunk of what I’m trying to do with my dissertation [...]
I’m sitting in on a seminar this fall called “New Directions in the Study of American Culture.” It’s also the introductory seminar of the new Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture. The class, being taught by Center Co-director Eric Slauter, has a clear premise: each week, we read a recently published book about [...]